With the growth of electronic commerce (e-commerce), distance learning, tele-commuting, digital video entertainment, tele-gaming, and sophisticated digital audio, video, and data content accessed from just about anywhere on the planet, there is significant interest in how to safely, securely, and reliably deliver communication traffic over wired and wireless connections. However, with all this content, significant problems arise, especially at the edge of the network or at access points. These significant problems deal with how to mix all this communication traffic into a single communication channel (pipe), where the pipe may be operating at low data rates, of less than 10 Megabits per second. Difficulties arise in attempting to move the communication traffic over the “last mile” of the connection. The communication data rates over the last portion of a data connection may vary from a slow V.34 or V.90 modem (perhaps only 28.8 kbps) to a Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) wireless data connection at 57.6 kbps, a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) modem with speeds ranging from 128 Kbits per second (Kbps) to 50 Mbps, or a cable modem operating with speeds of up to 32 Mbps. The speed over the last mile of a Wide Are Network (WAN) connection is not nearly as fast as most Local Area Network (LAN) based connections; therefore, optimizing the WAN portion of the communication traffic flow is important to overall quality of service.
The communication traffic in the WAN environment has widely varying needs, and yet all the traffic has to travel over the same transmission system to reach an end user. This means that all the communication traffic must be consolidated together in a reasonable manner. FIG. 4 is a table that lists example characteristics of different types of communication traffic and identifies the “environment” existing within communication networks. When all communication data are handled the same, without regard to the data type, the traffic may move more slowly, it may not be secure, and it may have additional jitter or buffering which often leads to poorer real-time delivery characteristics. Therefore, there is a need for a method and system to optimize the handling of communication traffic based on the type of data present.